How did i became a software engineer ?

Chapter 1. The Curious KID

When i was a kid, my father used to bring little toys home, i liked the ones with something mechanical in it. like a motor, a remote control car. The next day i get the toy, i used to break it ( my parents were mad about it :) ). I would get the motor, the motherboard and the other electronic parts from it and used to build something by my own.

It was 2013 or so when i got to know about Drones, an un-manned-arial-vehicle. what flies on it's own. Since i have a collection of motors, and remote control motherboards with me, i tried to build one a, proper 4 propeller drone. but little that i know, that these DC motors from toy cars are not capable of pushing the weight of the entire thing and flying. i spend a lot of money buying these fancy propellers , but the root cause (as i thought ) was the motors.

Back in the day, we had little to NO internet connection in India, and searching through online and getting the knowledge was not so common. And this is when i was 12 or something.

One day i went to this electronic shop to get something, and i got introduced to this shop keeper, he absolutely distroied my confidence , he told me that this will become a rabbit hole and you are spending a lot of your parents hard earned money , one thing you should focus on right now is to play with other kids and not these things. ( later i realized that these words coming from his mouth is constructed by mom. because she always had this fear that i am playing with electricity and something bad will happpen. )

It hurted me alot and i packed all the electronics that i had and buried and distroyed everything.

Chapter 2. First laptop

Since i lost the instrest on electronics after this event. i was playing alot of mobile games because there is nothing that i can spend my free time on. then out of somewhere a guy i used to know gave me this old laptop from 2010, it was a dell inspiron mini 1018. ( i remember every single thing about it even the vendor id on it's back panel is my password till date. ) It had 2 installations , one ubuntu and a windows 7 ultimate edition. i didn't get the password for ubuntu version. so i kept it for a year and tried ways to crack it's password by editing the grub config and all but nothing helped ( it is possible but at that time i didnt had another pc where i can flash a live boot installation of linux ) . so mainly i used the windows version, Since it has this 1.6 Ghz single cor processor and 2 GB ram , nothing was possible on that machine, it was simply a potato machine. i played some games that are smaller in size like 2MB games, DOOM and all. and simply the phone i was using back in the day , (karbon k2) does not have wifi hotspot. i couldnt use the internet on that machine. the games where donwloaded from that phone to the sd card. and then transferd to the netbook.

one day i was playing with regeddit on windows and i broke the laptop I was frustrated with this as well, because there is nothing you can do with this laptop, so i went to this computer service store , told them to flash ubuntu on it. payed like 500 INR for that and i got windows installation as well.

Since i got ubuntu working, i downloaded a tool called aircrack-ng and hacked to my neighbers wifi. because for some good reason, the netbook's wifi card supported sending packets and intercepting it.

After sometimes i brought a smartphone, this samsung s1426 which i flashed several custom roms on it , flashed a custom recovery, and introduced to these telegram support channels. where i found some good people that are building custom roms. i tried getting into that , but to compile something like the AOSP (Android open source program ) ROMs would require hardware that i even dont have access to in 2026. like they required 36Gb ram, 100s of gigs of SSD storage, fast internet connection and atleast 12 core 24 thread cpus.

But the other thing that i could do on my laptop was to build the android kernel. kernels are relatively smaller in size like 14mb for my phone, i could easlily build it , and flash it on my phone. but there are compactibility issues, like not all kernels are supported on all the roms. so building the kernel around the rom was the only way. but these rom developers already had tooling for that , like they get the kernel as well when the build the rom itself. so i was not providing any help to those people.

Ofcourse it helped me in other ways like i bundled this wifi driver to the kernel so i was able to hack other peoples wifi just by using my phone. installed aircrack-ng on my phone via termux.

Good things happend. Even tho i had this super annoying , potato pc . where it cannot even load a website properly ( like when i open youtube the laptop used to hang ) when i used linux , i learened the Vim text editor. because it was not possible to rum Atom ( now Vs-code ) on that machine. Sublime text worked , but you know how bad it is, Since then vim is my editor till this day and it will be till the end of the world i have vim mapping on firefox, youtube, everything.

Chapter 3: Getting a job.

I knew i couldn't build a career in this because the potato pc was the main bottleneck. so while i was in collage i did some painting work,plumbing, and stuff to make like 6K INR. i brought a laptop with that money which had a 2 core 4 thread , 4gb ram, 250gb ssd. itel pentium processor. (The toshiba satellite 655)

Which worked fairly good, it can handle firefox, vim, and a compiler. so what's next ? i learned programming, the loops, ifs etc..

I built some websites with html, bootstrap, got good at it. then tailwind. but little that i know the IT jobs does not require these, i got interviewed around 40 companies and none of them hired me.

Then i noticed this pattern. the job titles where like this, Frontend Engineer (React) not html developer. So read the entire react documentation, i understood shit. read it again. these hooks , callback functions, and re-concilation logics where new to me. i tried memorizing these hooks and its usages but i would fail on the machine test. so another 20 interviews and i got it. i got the interview secret the patterns of questions they ask. and where should i focus more. And i got placed at a company. ( as a developer ) but unpaid. i worked there for 3 months. but in the mean time i was all into it. learning the tech. ) but the company was like old school , they where not using git. but they used to zip the code and send it themself on gmail. i noticed this pattern and i choose to leave the job. The pay was not the issue, but they lacked future thinking. the developers where below average ( looking into their keyboard ) even after having 3-4 years of exp ). then i became unemployed again. but in the mean time i got a freelance client, the wanted this website ( a static page ) i built it using react and tailwind ) so financially i had money for few months, for the internet etc.

In that peroid i got deeper into react , javascript i was confident about the terminologies, the single threaded nature of js, how the callstack work etc. so i applied to this software training institute. where i used to train students ( collage grads ) about fullstack, and frontend with react.

Chapter 5: The realization

The job was fancy, i was getting good at communication, and getting deeper into the technologies, because you need to know the internals to teach others

because if some student asks like why does this work in this way ? you cannot relay like ,ooh i don't know they made it in this way. because this is software , everything is built for a reason. Every software, every tools , every programming languages was to fix some problems. so there will be a reason for that.

The problems

When you are a teacher, you are telling the same stuff every single day, i used to repeat the sentance i say 3 times a day, when i look back. i was not progressing as fast as i want. but i felt repeating myself again and again.

there was progression but it was slower. i went from react to node, then react native. but i learned the working and architecture of it. but i never got introduced to good quality projects.

So i left the job as a bootcamp faculty and joined this new company, which is a product company and they do build softwares. so since i was good at react and react native joined it as a react native developer.

Built their web3 wallet apps, video streaming applications, built a custom video player in react native so it could handle multiple video resolutions, pitch in zoom and picture in picture ( everything but without the help of AI )

then i moved to nextjs projects, backend ( since i already have the core knowledge from the first job ) , built super cool high performance appliations with skia renderer that renders the graphics i wrote with reanimated, renders and it renders on the gpu. without blocking the js thread. backend systems that handles a million users, deployed on aws. got into webrtc, websockets. and loved these clean architecture and ci cd pipelines with gh actions. wrote unit , integration , e2e tests , containarized the applications,

Final Chapter: The Lessions

• When you are good at something don't let other people kill it, work for yourself for your future.
• You don't have to find your passion, the passion is what makes you intresting, and steals your sleep.
• If you are the smartest person in the room. Leave the room
• When something feels repeated and less challenging then stop and rethink about your life, not about today, but about the next 10 years. where do you want to see yourself in 10 years.
• Avoid distractions, Say NO to yourself , There is no god that is guiding you from the top or helps you in your life when its hard, your brain is just some flesh and combination of hormones that guides you, your good moves, the bad moves. so treat your brain as BRAIN. and do not let emotions ( again hormones ) take actions over your life.